Those who found themselves suddenly laid off during the pandemic may be feeling more encouraged with promising vaccines on the horizon. But economic experts suggest that many of those jobs won’t automatically reappear when the Covid crisis passes and those that do will not be in the same abundance as before.

While the labor market has gained back 12 million of the 22 million jobs lost from February to April, many of those positions won’t return any time soon even after a vaccine is successfully deployed. 

According to a recent New York Times article by Eduardo Porter:

“This is likely to prove especially problematic for millions of low-paid workers in service industries like retailing, hospitality, building maintenance and transportation, which may be permanently impaired or fundamentally transformed. What will janitors do if fewer people work in offices? What will waiters do if the urban restaurant ecosystem never recovers its density?”

To stand the best chance at rejoining the workforce they will need to retrain, upskill and re-orient their careers. There’s little choice otherwise. According to Marcela Escobari, an economist at the Brookings Institution, if the economy adds jobs as the pandemic fades, “the rebound won’t help the people that have been hurt the most.”

But how do you quickly retrain millions of workers and prepare them for a new economy where sophisticated and specialized skills will be critical? 

The Times article continues: 

“We need a New Deal for skills,” said Amit Sevak, president of Revature, a company that hires workers, trains them to use digital tools and helps place them in jobs.

“President Roosevelt deployed the massive number of workers unemployed in the Great Depression on projects that created many of the dams and roads and bridges we have. We need something like that.”

Every crisis presents challenges and opportunities. We believe there is an opportunity for workers to take advantage of this momentous shift and use JazzJune’s platform to identify new paths forward. 

We will have a robust search tool to find the right classes at the right price, crowdfunding options to overcome funding gaps, advisors to help along the way, a social channel to stay engaged with fellow learners and a jobs board for when you’re ready to make that next step.

We’ve said we want to help create a million new jobs, and we meant it.